Cape Town: things to do worth your time

The wide white crescent under the Twelve Apostles that most visitors picture when they picture Cape Town, with a palm-lined strip of restaurants two minutes from the sand.

Four white-sand coves separated by granite boulders and sheltered from the southeaster, reached down long flights of steps below some of the most expensive houses in Africa.

A sheltered cove of 540-million-year-old granite boulders where a colony of endangered African penguins nests within touching distance of the boardwalk, and where you can swim in calm, warm-ish False Bay water.

The warmest, gentlest, most forgiving surf beach in Cape Town, with a row of rainbow bathing boxes, a shark spotting programme on the mountain above and a train station 200 metres from the break.

A small, boulder-framed Atlantic cove with no shops, no restaurants and no bus, reached down steps from a residential lane, and reckoned by many locals to be the best sunset in Cape Town.

The southern end of an eight-kilometre wilderness beach, one of the most consistent surf breaks on the peninsula, walked by dog owners and horse riders under the black-and-white Slangkop lighthouse.

Eight kilometres of open sand below Chapman's Peak, with horse riders at the water line, the ribs of the 1900 Kakapo wreck in the dunes and enough space to lose everyone else within five minutes.

The Saturday morning that turned a derelict Victorian biscuit factory in Woodstock into the loudest, best-smelling room in Cape Town, where a hundred traders sell everything from Cape Malay curry to hand-thrown ceramics.

Cape Town's best weekend food market, run by a community farm project, spread across a Granger Bay lot with Table Mountain on one side and the Atlantic on the other.

A rusting fish factory on Hout Bay harbour rebuilt into a warren of a hundred-odd stalls, with live bands on Friday nights and the smell of snoek and woodsmoke over everything.

A cobbled 1690s square in the middle of the City Bowl, ringed by Cape Dutch and Art Deco facades and filled six days a week with African craft traders who expect you to haggle.

The island prison where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site reached by ferry and guided by men who were imprisoned in the same cell blocks.

A small, fiercely personal museum built by former residents of the inner-city neighbourhood that apartheid bulldozed, where the exhibits are street signs, family photographs and a floor map annotated by the people who lived on it.

The largest museum of contemporary African art in the world, carved out of a 1921 grain silo at the V&A Waterfront, where the building itself is as much the exhibit as the art inside it.

Cape Town's great democratic space: three kilometres of paved seafront where the whole city walks, runs, prays, sells ice cream and watches the sun go down over the Atlantic.

The oldest cultivated garden in South Africa, planted in 1652 to feed passing ships and now six shaded hectares of roses, oaks, fat squirrels and history in the middle of the city.

The best thing the 2010 World Cup left behind: twelve hectares of lawns, ponds, play equipment and an indigenous teaching garden, wedged between the stadium, the golf course and the sea.

A 669-metre cone you can climb in an hour with nothing but your legs, ending on a summit that shows you Table Mountain, both oceans and the whole city at once.

The highest, wildest slice of Table Mountain National Park you can drive into, with a swimmable mountain reservoir, a wheelchair-friendly boardwalk and a cave in the cliff that looks out over half the peninsula.

The green, dripping, dog-walking back garden of Table Mountain, where Capetonians go on Sunday mornings for shade, streams and a contour path that runs for miles.

The steep, cobbled Cape Malay quarter on the slopes of Signal Hill, with the oldest mosque in South Africa, the brightest houses in the city and three centuries of history behind the paint.

A kilometre of Victorian cast-iron balconies running the length of the City Bowl, secondhand bookshops and antique dealers by day, the city's most notorious bar strip by night.

A working fishing harbour, a Victorian railway village and a single street of antique shops, bookshops and fish restaurants squeezed between the mountain and False Bay.